


Unfailing

by 221b_hound



Series: Unkissed [35]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: John's war history, M/M, Nightmares, PTSD John
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-10
Updated: 2015-03-10
Packaged: 2018-03-17 05:16:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3516779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/221b_hound/pseuds/221b_hound
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The case in Newcastle ends successfully, but it triggers more nightmares for John. He escapes from them into the night, but Sherlock follows, and finally John starts to tell him about some of the things that haunt his dreams. He tells Sherlock about how he failed a friend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unfailing

**Author's Note:**

> When I posted the last story, Untended, I missed flagging it as an Unkissed story, so some of you may have missed the notification. Pop back and read it now. We'll be waiting here...

The case was gruesome, as evidenced by the series of photographs Sherlock brought up on his phone to show to John on the train trip to Newcastle. Dismembered body parts hidden on several bridges linking Newcastle Upon Tyne with Gateshead, from the Newburn and the Swing Bridge to the Tyne and the Gateshead Millennium bridges.

That added up to a lot of body parts.

John, long inured to this sort of thing even before he’d met Sherlock, took Sherlock’s phone to pinch the images in and out of close-up.

“How many bodies do they think these add up to?” he asked.

“They only discovered the pieces late last night, so they’re waiting for the report,” said Sherlock, watching John’s reaction with avid expectation, “But their first thought was three dead. Two men, one Caucasian, the other black, and a Caucasian woman.”

John frowned. “It looks like that, but this,” he tapped his finger, “The skin on these remains is very pale. Paler than you. White, nearly, which isn’t natural for normal human skin. And these,” John flicked rapidly to another of the gory images, “I’d say they were a physical match for those other pieces, except for the darkness of the skin. This is what they think is two men, yes?”

“Correct.”

“I think there’s a good chance they’ll find it’s one man with a pigment condition called vitiligo. I saw a recruit with that once. It was pretty distressing for him, and then his unit started calling him Cam – Camouflage – and he sort of took that on as a badge of pride, you know?”

“Vitiligo?”

“Loss of skin pigmentation, usually starting on the areas of the body exposed to sunlight. These white parts,” John flicked back, “Are parts of arms, hands, that looks like part of the poor bastard’s face, but these,” flick flick, back to the dark-skinned parts, “Stomach, upper legs. Jesus. He’s been cut up pretty precisely where the skin changes colour.”

Sherlock beamed at him. “Excellent.”

“God, this isn’t some twisted racially motivated bullshit, is it?”

“I hope not. _Dull_.”

John, inured to this too, leaned back in the seat and stared at the photo again. “Someone did this to obscure the identity of the dead man.”

“Certainly,” said Sherlock, his voice warm with approval, “Though the deception would surely not last for long.”

“Long enough for someone to get away?”

“Only we’re faster,” said Sherlock with a broad grin, and John laughed, because most of the time that was true. “Anything about the woman’s body?” he prompted.

John flicked to those pictures. “She’s older than him,” he noted, “He’s young, early twenties at the latest, but she’s in her 40s or 50s and…” He bent close to the images, pinching them out for a closer look. “She looks like she’s got vitiligo too. It doesn’t seem as advanced, and she’s Caucasian, so it’s not so obvious.”

Sherlock made a satisfied noise, reclaimed his phone and spent the rest of the train trip with his fingers dancing over the screen, conducting searches and collecting data.

*

The case led to a factory where both of the deceased had worked, and the presence of insecticide at the cannery where no insecticide should be, because of someone storing canisters of home-made stuff for a back-of-the-lorry ‘organic’ business (which wasn’t) run by the foreman, Ewan McCawley.

Young cannery worker, Danny Johnson, and Mrs Miriam Cray, a third cousin of Danny’s mum’s, and who worked a completely different shift, had both been exposed to a leak in the potent stuff stored near where they and others took their regular smoko breaks.

Danny and Miriam both carried a congenital predisposition for developing vitiligo. When the two of them started showing symptoms – Danny more than Miriam due to his dark skin – and confronted him, McCawley tried to cover up his misdeeds with worse ones.

McCawley had cut up the bodies but tried to jam the parts in obscure places on the bridges where the birds, he’d hoped, would destroy the evidence, or at least give him time to sod off to Scotland. He thought he was being clever, scattering the parts, rather than dumping them in the river where tides and fishermen would bring them up. Make it look like a crazed serial killer, like in the movies, rather than some grubby little crook.

Sherlock and John arrived in Newcastle at around 10am. They had pretty much solved it by 3pm, but finding the scarpering McCawley again took a mite longer.

“I hate it when they try to be clever when they’re _not_ ,” complained Sherlock in aggravated tones as they chased McCawley over the Millennium Bridge, having forced him to abandon his car when John shot out his tyres.

He hated it more when the bridge began to tilt when they were half way across.

As they came up on McCawley, the foreman drew a gun, not two metres away from them. He yelled, “Don’t make me, don’t make me do this!” in a broad Glaswegian accent as he pointed the weapon straight at John’s chest.

And John… for a second, just a split second, John hesitated.

Then the bridge’s slow, graceful tilt, allowing a ship to pass under it, got steeper, and McCawley stumbled and the gun was suddenly pointing at Sherlock, and John launched himself at the foreman like a small missile made of rage. McCawley’s gun went flying into the Tyne, and he looked like he was about to follow. He shrieked and cried for help as he reached for John.

John held his arms out for McCawley to catch onto them, unable to grip the man himself. He kept his arms braced, giving the murderous son of a bitch something solid to cling to. Sherlock had his hands around John’s legs and his own ankles were clamped around one of the barrier supports and they were all being mildly pelted with the rubbish that was zipping past them into the rubbish traps designed to catch any falling debris.

McCawley was begging John not to let him fall, and he managed to hold on to John’s arms for the eight minutes it took for the bridge to go through its complete rise and reverse. By then, the police, chasing after Sherlock’s text message, had caught up with them.

Sherlock didn’t fuss while the police were there, but his quick glances to John’s hands satisfied him that no undue further damage had been done, though the burns on John’s palm and wrist were obviously paining him, and his broken fingers ached.

By the time the statements were taken and the official admin was done, it was too late for a train back to London, another two or three hours away, so they found a hotel for the night.

*

John woke, gasping, from a nightmare, the old one, the oldest one, from when he was a boy. It had been with him a lot, lately, after decades without it. He shuddered and whimpered, the noise he’d made when he’d had that dream when he was little.

He was aware of a hand wrapped carefully around his wrist and a voice beside him urging him gently to, “Sssh, sssh, it’s all right, John.”

John turned towards the voice, towards the soft touch on his wrist that immediately shifted across his waist and around his back, as he burrowed into Sherlock’s chest. He breathed in and out slowly, and let the tension bleed away with every exhale, and every gentle touch of Sherlock’s lips to his forehead and temple.

It was wearing, this nightly parade of fears; the return of things he hadn’t dreamed of in a very long time.

After a time, his breathing steadied and he fell back to sleep.

_The hospital room is too warm, and it smells of antiseptic and blood and the dry air of Afghanistan, and McCawley, in army uniform, has a gun. It’s not his gun. It belongs to one of his mates, who brought him in, or maybe he got it from John, or maybe the nurse had it, it’s not really clear, but he has the gun and his eyes are wide and they are seeing everything, but they are not seeing the hospital room. McCawley’s eyes are x-ray eyes, seeing outside the hospital, outside the base, outside fucking time and space, maybe, but not this, not here, not John, because if he knew it was John, if he knew John was here, he’d know it was all right._

_The floor tilts, just a little at first, and McCawley is crying and the gun is still pointing at John, and then the nurse, and then John and he’s crying, **stay back** , don’t come near me, I swear, I swear I will, you don’t, you don’t get to, you keep your hands off me, I’m not telling you anything, not a fucking thing from me, you keep away, I’m not, I can’t, I... don’t come near me. Don’t make me. **Don’t make me do this. Please. Please. Stop. Stop.**_

_John says it’s all right, Ollie, you’re safe, let me see what they did, let me help, let me take care of you, ssh, it’s all right, let me…_

_He steps towards McCawley; no, Ollie; no, McCawley? No. definitely Ollie Miller, in his torn and bloodied uniform, rescued, body anyway, his mind is somewhere else._

_The floor tilts higher, and there’s the smell of the river and the air is damp and a ship’s horn blares._

_Sherlock is there, in army fatigues and a huge coat, Great War vintage, and he reaches out to Ollie. “You are experiencing a reaction to trauma,” he says in a lecturing tone, “You are about to say goodbye. This is your note.”_

_Ollie points the gun at Sherlock. **Leave me alone**. Don’t make me. **Stop.**_

_John wants to step between them, but his feet are stuck, and he can’t move._

_And Ollie pulls the trigger._

_Sherlock falls, but no, he floats, his arms wide, he’s like a kite, and the impact of the bullet has only set him free, to fly, and John wants to fly with him, but he can’t, he’ll weigh him down and they’ll both fall and smash and be covered in blood._

_The way John is, right now, covered in blood and pain and he can’t breathe properly._

_The floor tilts and tilts and tilts and John is sliding and he can’t stop himself. His arm won’t work. Blood everywhere. All his blood, everywhere, and the pain of it, and he can feel the wetness of his life leaving him through the hole in his body from the bullet that seems to have missed Sherlock after all, but ploughed into him, into his shoulder, and Ollie/McCawley weeps, **no more, no more, no more,** and puts the gun in his mouth and his brains, which still think they are somewhere else, spray all over the nurse behind him._

_No, John is thinking, and maybe his mouth is making those shapes, No. I can help, Ollie. Let me. Let me…_

John’s eyes flew open, but the sound was trapped in his throat. His body was rigid, trembling, and he stared into the darkness wondering why he wasn’t dead any more.

Then he remembered.

He breathed in slowly. Out. In. Out. Sherlock, next to him, murmured in his sleep and shuffled closer, pressing his nose against John’s shoulder.

“I’m okay, baby. Go to sleep.” His voice was a rasp, but it seemed enough. Sherlock settled.

John felt like the room was tilting. That any minute, he would be tipped right out of bed. Onto the hospital floor. Bleeding out.

The claustrophobia was sudden and awful. He needed air. He needed a breeze on his skin, the nighttime on it too, damp and smelling of the river and the boats and a million, million miles from Afghanistan and from this little room with its cream walls and windows in the wrong place…

John drew in a sharp breath, held it a moment, then shoved the bedding back. He stumbled out of their bed.

“John?”

“Go back to sleep, sweetpea. I just need to stretch my legs a bit.”

“I…”

“It’s okay, honeybee. I promise. I’ll be right back.”

In the darkness, John pulled on jeans, shoved his sockless feet into shoes, grabbed his jumper and stumbled out of the room. Out of the hotel. Into the streets of Newcastle.

*

Sherlock found him, an hour later, standing on the Swing Bridge.

‘Found’ wasn’t really the right word. After his half-asleep exchanges with John, Sherlock had realised John meant to go outside for his leg-stretch, his breath just this side of hyperventilation. John obviously meant to take his walk alone, but that didn’t mean Sherlock would let him. So he dragged on his own clothes in the dark and followed.

John had set a cracking pace, marching down to the river, breathing sharply through his nose, out through his mouth, looking down at the ground the whole way.

Then he’d walked out onto Swing Bridge and stood at the half way point. Sherlock had a terrible moment, wondering if he had completely misread John somehow, but no, of course not. John wasn’t climbing the barrier. He was just looking at the water and at the series of bridges across the Tyne.

Sherlock strode into view and towards John, ensuring he would be seen. John turned his head to watch him. When Sherlock reached his side, John turned his attention back to the river.

“Sorry. I shouldn’t have just taken off like that. I needed some air, and I didn’t want to talk about it.”

Sherlock stood beside John, hands on the railing, and watched the river flow. “I won’t ask.”

“I know. You’ve been not asking for a while now.” John winced at how accusatory that sounded. “Sorry. I’ve appreciated it.”

“I’m still not asking,” said Sherlock, “I won’t. If you want to tell me, you will.”

“I think I want to, I just… I talked about it with the doctors, sometimes, at the start when I was still having all the reconstructive surgery and then the fever nearly took me out. I had worse nightmares when I did, so I stopped talking and they went away.”

“But now they’re back.”

“Yeah. And it feels like… if I talk about it, it won’t help. It’ll make it worse again. I just want it to go away.”

Sherlock was silent.

“And I think… maybe I think you’ll deduce it and I won’t have to say it out loud.”

Sherlock frowned and inched a little closer to John, so that their shoulders were pressed together.

“It relates to your injury, obviously, the one that got you discharged. You’ve had this nightmare before – before all this with Milverton, I mean, though I’m not sure you remember. It’s not like your other dreams about the war. There’s something worse about it. I investigated what I could, of course, when we first moved in to Baker Street.”

“Of course.” But John was smiling indulgently.

“It wasn’t clear, however. You are on the record with two military medals for bravery, but neither related to your wound.”

“No.”

“I can only deduce so much without data, John. I don’t read minds.”

“I know.” John sighed. “I don’t suppose it was in the papers at the time. The army doesn’t like to bandy this kind of thing about.”

“Ah,” said Sherlock in sudden knowing. “Friendly fire. But not an incident in the field. You were a doctor. You were mainly at the base.” He paused a moment. “Who is Ollie?” When John didn’t move, he added, “You talk during your nightmares, sometimes. You said his name, tonight.”

John closed his eyes. He leaned towards Sherlock, and in the next moment, Sherlock’s arm was across his back. “Ollie was a friend of mine. He shot me. He didn’t mean to.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” began Sherlock.

“I think I do,” John said, “It made me hesitate tonight, on the bridge with McCawley. For a second there, it was just like Ollie. _Don’t make me,_ he said _._ It wasn’t Ollie’s fault, though. He didn’t realise it was me.”

Sherlock turned so that he had both arms wrapped around John, and his nose pressed to John’s temple. The tension in John’s body relented slightly, but it did not go away.

“His patrol had been ambushed,” said John, “and the Taliban took him and one of his corporals prisoner. It was weeks before one of the other squads found them, and that was pure chance. The corporal was dead and Ollie had been… he’d been tortured. Sleep deprivation wasn’t a fraction of it, but he was in a hell of a bad way when they got him to us. And it was like, he didn’t know where he was. He didn’t recognise anyone. Something triggered him, we don’t know what, someone dropping a bedpan or something, but one minute he was on the stretcher shaking like a leaf, and the next he was on his feet. He grabbed a guard’s gun and he was trying to run for it. He thought we were the Taliban, messing with him. Trying to hurt him. I kept talking to him the whole time, and I swear, I _swear_ he was starting to come down from it. He started to remember me. I’m sure of it. But as I was reaching out, trying to get him to give me the gun, that switch went in his head again, and he just… he… shot me. Then he shot himself, right through the head. I don’t remember much after that.”

He leaned against Sherlock’s chest, and half turned to press his face into Sherlock’s faded T-shirt under his coat. “I could have saved him. I know I could have. If I’d just known the right words. I’d nearly broken through, I know I had. If I’d just had a few more minutes.”

“You did everything you could.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know you.”

John made a little sound, a huff, and shook his head slightly. Then he said, “It terrified me, what happened to Ollie. Absolutely terrified me, when I started have PTSD blackouts. The idea that I might forget where I was, and who everyone was, and shoot them, or myself, because the trauma can give you hallucinations. At least once in the earliest days after my discharge, I found myself on the floor of that old bedsit with my gun in my hand and I didn’t remember getting it, or loading it. I took to disassembling the gun on bad nights, hiding bits of it all over the place so I wouldn’t… hurt anyone.”

“Hence the bullets in that champagne bottle at Canterbury, and your gun in pieces all over the room.”

“Yeah.”

“You knew him, you said. Ollie.”

“Yeah. We used to catch up when he was at base. He’d take me to the firing range to keep my skills up. We did karaoke, all sorts of stupid shit. He was my friend…”

Sherlock raised his head to stare over the top of John’s, at the buildings on the far side of the river. “He was your friend, and he wounded you grievously, and he killed himself in front of you.”

John drew back at the sudden tension in his voice and body, to look up into Sherlock’s face in the telling silence. John broke it with, “It's not like you, Sherlock. It's nothing like what happened with you at all.”

“How was it different?”

“Well, you didn't shoot me, you didn't actually kill yourself and you weren't out of your head with terror, for starters.”

“I was, though. Half mad with it anyway. If I'd failed…” 

“You didn't.”

“I hurt you grievously, if not physically then psychologically.” 

“To save me. And you came back. We've been over this, Sherlock.”

Sherlock ducked his head again. “We have.”

“There wasn’t another way.”

“No. There wasn’t.” Sherlock frowned and pulled away again, this time to look into John’s eyes. “And there wasn’t for you, either.” At the question in John’s eyes, he expanded this thought. “You said you could have saved Ollie.”

“I could have,” said John, voice tight, “I should have. If I’d just said the right thing, done the right thing, I could have saved him.”

“You did all you could.”

“So everyone says. I disagree. If I’d done everything I could, he’d be alive.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Recognised the direction his distress was taking him sooner. Made the RMPs back off so he didn’t get the gun. Said the right thing when he needed it.”

“You know that’s a logical fallacy, don’t you John?”

“It’s how it is,” snapped John, “Ollie’s dead and it’s my fault.”

“How?”

John glared at him.

“I'll tell you, will I?” suggested Sherlock, in the face of that expression, half anger and half something else entirely, “Exactly what you could have done?”

John’s glare broke down into fear, into shame, into sorrow, and he swallowed. And nodded.

Sherlock wanted nothing more than to hold his husband, who had such faith in him, who would offer up his trauma and distress to Sherlock, to be told the answer he longed for, and feared, even if it meant evidence that he really had been culpable.

“The medics with the unit that rescued him could have sedated him heavily from the moment they freed him, before they’d brought him to the compound.”

“No,” John countered, “He wasn’t in such an agitated state then, and we didn’t know what else was already in his system. You can’t just sedate someone, especially if there are no indications measures like that are necessary and there are signs of other subtances in the bloodstream.”

“You should all have abandoned him, once he had the gun. Walked away and let him have his panic attack and hallucinations on his own, while you went for cover.”

“Of course we couldn’t,” said John irritably, “We had a whole ward of patients to consider, not to mention Ollie’s own injuries. They’d burned his hands and feet, broken his ribs, we couldn’t just leave him to it. _What the hell_ …?”

“The military police should have been more aware of the dangers. The nursing staff should have called for help sooner. Ollie himself should have had a stronger mind…”

“Jesus, Sherlock, you’re talking about people who did their best, every bloody day, in impossible circumstance, to do their jobs well. And Ollie, that poor bastard, even in that state, he was trying to be a good soldier, trying not to give away intel that could kill his mates, he was…”

“You allow that everyone else did all they could,” said Sherlock softly. “Why not allow it for yourself?”

John’s ire stalled. “What? But. I.”

“You are determined to carry blame that is not yours.”

“No. I…”

“A friend, traumatised by torture, is brought to you after being in others’ care. A chain of people, from those who found him, to those who brought him to you, all had some share of it, and when the moment came, it was sudden and spontaneous and no-one could have prepared for it. And you and he suffered for it. But it was not your fault. Even though you think it was.”

“I should have been able to…”

“How. Tell me how, and I’ll believe you. But if you can’t, you have to believe me. It wasn’t your fault.”

John blinked at him. He grimaced. “It was. I… it always felt like it was. That I failed him. But now…”

“Now?”

“Saying it out loud. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it?”

“No.”

“It made more sense inside my head.” John attempted a sheepish smile.

Sherlock remained kindly-stern. “Things do, John, inside our heads. Do you understand the things that made sense inside _my_ head before Manchester? Before you met Victor? Before we married? That I was broken. That I was abnormal and could never hope to know how to love properly. That certainly no one could love someone as strange and broken and abnormal as me. That when my mother was cold to me, and my brother controlling, when people were uncaring of my preferences or cruel in their pronouncements of what they said it meant about me – that I _deserved_ it. That all I had to offer anyone was my brain, and most people didn't even want that, and without even that, I was worthless....”

“Honeybee. Stop. That’s ridiculous. Stop it.”

John’s distress was on the rise again, and Sherlock relented. He cradled John’s face in his hands. “I don’t believe those things now. You taught me to take those notions outside of my own head and to see them for what they were.”

“Sherlock…”

“These failings you think are yours don’t belong to you.

“Whose are they then?”

“No-one’s. The universe’s. Circumstance. The world doesn't make sense, John. There's only the sense we make of it.”

“I know. I know that really.”

“Do you? You seem to think sometimes that you are responsible for anything you can’t control or change, as though being unable to cure everyone or save everyone is due to a lack in you. It's madness, don't you see?”

“I…”

“What is it you always tell me about Moriarty, and the way I left?”

John was still, then he reached up to rest his fingers against Sherlock’s jaw. 'Stop blaming yourself. You did all that could be done.  If there’d been any other choice, you would have made it.”

“Exactly.”

John sighed.

“You need to get it outside your head to see it,” said Sherlock softly, “That’s all.” 

John exhaled slowly and sank into Sherlock’s arms, which were willingly wrapped around him. “I know it doesn’t make sense. It’s never made sense.”

“How did you get to think it was down to you, to fix all the things that are wrong?” Sherlock asked, nuzzling against John’s temple, kissed the skin by his eyes. 

“I don't think that.”

“You do.” 

John paused, because Sherlock was right. He did, about some things, anyway. “I don't know. It's how I've always been. It's what I've always done.”

“Well you don't have to do it all, now. Not in your own anyway.”

John huffed a happier laugh. “No. Not any more.”

“That’s it.” Sherlock bent to kiss John, who leaned up to meet his honeybee’s soft mouth.

They kissed on the bridge in the Newcastle darkness, for a lovely long time, until John finally asked, “Are you actually just in your pyjamas under that coat?”

“Yes,” said Sherlock, “I didn’t have time to change.”

“Numpty.”

“Says the man in a pyjama top and an inside-out jumper.”

John looked down at himself, at the sight of the woolly seams, and laughed. “Bloody hell.”

“So come back to the hotel and if we can’t sleep, I’ll give you a foot rub until it‘s time for the first train home.”

“An excellent plan, honeybee.”

“Yes. I have many of them.”

“I look forward to them all.”

Holding hands, they headed back to their hotel.

Sherlock kept the conversation light, and back in bed, massaged John’s feet until John dozed off again.

And he wondered about that other dream that John kept having. The one where his husband cried out in a voice small and young and frightened, but that could wait until John was ready to tell him that story, too.

**Author's Note:**

> The Ollie in this is an AU version of the one from John's war history story, [ Save My Soul](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2390756), in the Guitar Man Universe. John's history here is different from that one, too, though the story of his first medal in the other story is the same in this universe.


End file.
